EDUCATION; What High School Club Prepares Students for a TV Game Show?

By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER

Published: February 25, 2007

''SHE went to Africa in the 1950s, where she worked for paleontologist Louis Leakey,'' Robin Jacobsen said, reading aloud from a list of trivia questions. ''Name this British ethologist known for her detailed, long-term research with chimpanzees.''

Joe McGrann, an 11th grader, hit his buzzer.

''Jane Goodall,'' he replied.

Ms. Jacobsen, co-adviser to the Quiz Bowl club at Smithtown High School West, acknowledged his correct answer, then added another tidbit. ''If you rang in early you might have said Dian Fossey, who also worked with apes and gorillas,'' she said.

Ms. Jacobsen, a 39-year-old teacher of United States history, economics and government, was drilling the members of the club after school on a recent Wednesday afternoon. A former contestant on ''Jeopardy!'' and ''Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,'' Ms. Jacobsen, of Seaford, calls herself ''a pop-culture junkie.'' She is also an avid reader who loves to do crossword puzzles.

''I have a lot of random knowledge,'' she said, ''and I try to impart that to them.''

To help prepare members of the club for forthcoming competitions on Cablevision's ''Long Island Challenge,'' Ms. Jacobsen, with her fellow teacher Jeff Cohn, urges the students to think fast and make split-second decisions under pressure.

The ''Long Island Challenge,'' a 10-year-old academic quiz show on Channel 12, pits two teams from opposing high schools against one another in a Jeopardy-style format, testing students' knowledge of history, the arts, literature, math and science.

Only five students per school participate in the television show, but 20 members of the Quiz Bowl club attend monthly competitions with teams from other local high schools and are headed to a tournament at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March.

Smithtown High School West has won its first two rounds of ''Long Island Challenge'' competition. Its first match, against Harborfields High School, will be shown March 3 and 4 at 6:30 and 9:30 p.m. The third-round appearance will be taped at the end of March. If the team makes it to the Long Island championship, it will face off against schools from New Jersey and Connecticut for the program's first tristate championship.

Mr. Cohn, 56, of Lido Beach is a former lawyer who switched careers to teaching seven years ago. He sees the competition as helping students ''get the benefits of thinking quickly on their feet.''

''They get the ability to have confidence in their knowledge,'' he said. Though he stressed that being involved in the Quiz Bowl club was mainly about fun, there can be more tangible rewards. Each student participating in the ''Long Island Challenge'' championship receives $500; each regional champion school gets $2,500 in prize money; and the school crowned tristate challenge champion receives $10,000. Teams from 32 schools are in the Long Island competition.

Ms. Jacobsen said she started watching ''Jeopardy!'' when she was 16.

''It just happened to be on after the soap opera I watched, 'Edge of Night,' '' she recalled. In 11th grade, she joined the Quiz Bowl team at Sanford H. Calhoun High School in Merrick.

Watching the ''Jeopardy!'' host Alex Trebek toss out the answers in different categories, Ms. Jacobsen and her sister, Tracy Marino, became ''very disciplined'' and ''very militaristic'' about the game, Ms. Jacobsen said

''I never blurted out an answer not in the form of a question,'' she said. ''It helped me on the show.''

Ms. Jacobsen appeared on the television show in 1999, winning twice and earning $10,000.

She had less luck with ''Who Wants to be a Millionaire,'' which she began watching while on maternity leave with her daughter, Kiersten, now 2 1/2. Ms. Jacobsen appeared on the program in September 2004, three weeks after Kiersten was born. She was up to $16,000 when her brother-in-law, Jim Perkowski, a groundskeeper at Eisenhower Park, supplied her with a wrong answer during the ''phone-a-friend'' lifeline. The question was about the diameter of a hole in golf. (The correct answer is 4.25 inches.)

''I went home with $1,000,'' she said.

As a result of her ''Jeopardy!'' experience, she has been able to help students prepare for competition with strategies as well as facts, she said.

Mike Chen, 17, the Quiz Bowl and ''Long Island Challenge'' team captain, said he had learned that a big part of succeeding at such competitions was ''not the knowledge but the confidence and the aggression.''

''It's better to try,'' he said, ''than to let the other team get it.''

Photo: BUZZERS READY -- Robin Jacobsen, a teacher at Smithtown High School West, drilling student members of the school's Quiz Bowl club. (Photo by Phil Marino for The New York Times)